An African Adventure

that eventually took me to the heart of equatorial Africa. The immediate objectives, so far as this chapter is concerned, are Kimberley, Joha

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on you the famous Karoo country, so familiar to all readers of South African novels and more especially those of Olive Schreiner, Richard Dehan and Sir Percy Fitz Patrick. It is an almost treeless plain dotted here and there with Boer homesteads. Their isolation suggests battle with element and soil. The country immediately around Capetown is a paradise of fruit and fl

ll army at bay. All through this region you encounter places that have become part of history. You pass the ruins of Kitchener's blockhouses,-they really ended the Boer War-and almost before you realize it, you cross

iege in the Boer War and the equally famous diamond mines. But it is much more for it is packed with romance and reality. Here came Cecil Rhodes in his early manhood and pulled off the biggest business deal of his life; here you find th

f the seventies overwhelmed the Vaal and Orange River regions, what is now the Kimberley section was a rocky plain with a few Boer farms. The influx of fortune-hunters dotted the area with tents and

did a characteristic thing. He left his claims each year to attend lectures at Oxford where he got his degree in 1881, after almost continuous commuting between England and Africa. Hence the Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford created

ght to American finance. His real name was Barnett Isaacs. After kicking about the streets of the East End of London he became a music hall performer under the name by which he is known to busines

Barnato an offer which was refused. With the aid of the Rothschilds in London Rhodes secretly bought out the French interests in the Barnato holdings for $6,000,000, which got his foot, so to speak, in the doorway of the opposition. But even this did not give him a working wedge. He was angling with other big stockholders

Rhodes, so the story goes, took him by the arm and said: "Barney, have you ever seen a bucketful of diamonds? I never ha

des resource, for a man at Kimberly told me that Rhodes knew beforehand exactly how many diamonds Barnato had and got the right sized bucket. Rhodes immediately strode from the room, got the time he wanted and consummate

ed Rhodes' business life. He once said, "Never fight with a man if you can deal with him

ed marketing of the output would lead to instability of price. He therefore formed the Diamond Syndicate in London, composed of a sm

rtune. He always referred to the mines as his "bread and cheese." He made and lost vast sums elsewhere and scattere

Raid and a romantic character in African annals. Jameson came to Kimberley to practice medicine in 1878. No less intimate was Rhodes' life-long attachment for Alfred Beit, who arrived at

most grotesque gash in the earth is to get the impression of a very small Grand Canyon of the Colorado. It is an awesome and terrifying spectacle for it is shot through with green and brown and purple, is more than a thousand feet wide at t

This is exposed to sun and rain for six months, after which it is shaken down, run over a grease table where the vasel

of some woman ten thousand miles away. I got an evidence of American cinema enterprise on this occasion for I suddenly debouched on a wide level and under the flickering lights I saw a Yankee operator turning the cra

and employed them in various capacities that ranged from introducing California fruits into South Africa and Rhodesia to ha

lidation, assumed the same post with the united interests. He developed the mechanical side of diamond production and for many years held what was perhaps the most conspicuou

ain's lack of preparedness, Kimberley only had a few seven pounders, while the Boers had "Long Toms" that hurled hundred pounders. At Rhodes' suggestion Labram manufactured a big gun capable of throwing a thirty-pound shell and it gave the besiegers a big and de